Wild swan: +1070
In order of page reached
1. The Death of Artemio Cruz/Carlos Feuntes – Three pages from the end. It’s ridiculous I know.
2. The Reprieve/Jean-Paul Sartre – Half way through.
3. The Idiot/Fyodor Dostoevsky – About page 80.
4. London Fields/Martin Amis – Page 69
5. Ulysses – Page 35 and that’s after the 70 page introduction!
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In order of page reached
1. The Death of Artemio Cruz/Carlos Feuntes – Three pages from the end. It’s ridiculous I know.
2. The Reprieve/Jean-Paul Sartre – Half way through.
3. The Idiot/Fyodor Dostoevsky – About page 80.
4. London Fields/Martin Amis – Page 69
5. Ulysses – Page 35 and that’s after the 70 page introduction!
1. Heroes/John Pilger – left the copy at my parents house. But no excuse really. I think he is an amazing man, and saw his film of Freedom Next Time and should read that book too.
2. Great Expectations/Charles Dickens – I think I need to be in the right mood for Dickens…haven’t discovered that mood yet!
3. White Teeth/Zadie Smith – got interrupted and for some reason never picked it back up again. A few people have recommended it so I think it would be worth another look.
4. Waiting for Godot/ Samuel Beckett – it was in French and my French definitely isn’t as good as it needs to be…however much I would like to think it is. Will read it in English first I think.
5. The Sea, the sea/Iris Murdoch – I’m reading this at the moment and really struggling. I really dislike the character of the narrator and it’s putting me off the book because I find him so annoying!
Can’t do it in order of pages reached but can do in order of the scale of the tragedy of having never finished.
1. Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy – Douglas Adams
left it on a train- and it was my dad’s copy – whoops! it was so funny. must get hold of it again!
2. Anna Karenin – Tolstoy. I was so slow getting through my mate moved out before i finished it and took it with her as it was her copy!
3. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen. I thought it was basically the same as Pride and Prejudice so didn’t bother carrying on, but liked the film so thinkI may have missed out.
4. 100 years of solitude – Garcia Marquez. I was reading it in Spanish and it all became a bit much. Plus, my fines at teh library were mounting up…think there’s a bit of a theme here – I should probably start buying my own books!
5. something by Kafka – I can’t even remember the titlt. I feel like i have to read it though as everyone always talks about things being ‘kafkaesque’ and i never quite know what they mean!
I’m generally very bad at leaving books unfinished – even really the bad ones – but these are a few that defeated me:
1. Ulysses, James Joyce: but I did get through most of the introduction, so that must count for something… right? (I’ll try again soon, I promise.)
2. Crime and Punishment, Dostoyesvsky: After refusing, point blank, to read it in school, I picked it up again last year, certain that I was now a mature adult who’d appreciate it. Not. I tried, I really did, but I just couldn’t get through the thing. And all those Russian names didn’t help.
3. The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie: It was so long ago, I can’t actually remember how far I got, or why I gave up. Perhaps it’s time to give it another go.
4. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino: I mean, come on, it’s not exactly reader-friendly!
5. Canterbury Tales, Chaucer: ditto.
And an example where my initial reaction was justified:
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho: got about halfway through, and it irritated the hell out of me, so I made a conscious decision to stop reading. And then, after numerous people I actually liked insisted it was their favourite book, I went back and read the whole thing. And it irritated the hell out of me, again, even more so than the first time round. I don’t mean to offend anyone, but I really don’t see what the fuss is about.
I have to admit that I really liked the Alchemist, but I think you have to be in the right mood to read it and try and close off any temptation to be too sceptical perhaps? I know some people who think of it a bit like their bible or something – I think that’s taking it a bit too far! But I think there are some nice messages in it.
I’m pretty sure there are more than 5 books i’ve dropped and never picked up again but these five are some…
1. Virginia Woolf/To The Lighthouse
2. Laurence Stern/Tristram Shandy
3. Herman Melville/Moby Dick
4. Emily Bronte/Wuthering Heights
5. Charles Dickens/Great Expectations
I feel thoroughly ashamed i didn’t make it through Great Expectations or Wuthering Heights but i don’t think i was old enough. Am on a crusade to read these books now!
Haha I think I might have been too young as well when I tried to read Wuthering Heights, but it’s always the case that I have to wait for a uni holiday before I have the time to read anything I would like to! Wuthering Heights is definitely on my list though!
Another book, although far less intellectual than most listed in this discussion, is Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Simply because, judging from what I did read, the film is quite different and I’d like to read the original version!
Also:
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
Shakespeare, King Lear (I feel I should read it!)
Voltaire, Candide
Felicity: I remember being asked to read Tristram Shandy in my first year at uni. Dutifully, I bought a copy, then spent several days amused, if completely baffled, thumbing through it rather absent-mindedly. Only when I got to the seminar to discuss Mr Shandy and his weird and wonderful relatives did I realise that about fifty pages of my copy had been missed out when the book was printed, and were substituted with a number of pages duplicated from earlier in the work. No wonder my first reading of it made little or no sense! ;) Steve Coogan made a great film of it.
Jo: if you’ve time, give De Quincey’s Confessions another go – its expansive, nightmarish visions made me feel like my head would explode at times, but in a good way!
My top five all too put-downable books:
1. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (yawn – but I should probably find it fascinating, and would be keen to hear from anyone who does)
2. A.N. Wilson’s The Victorians (by about a third of the way through, I find I can’t tolerate Wilson’s opinions any longer and put the book to one side. One day I will finish it, dammit.)
3. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (leaves me cold, which is odd, really, as I love The Great Gatsby)
4. Wesley Stace’s Misfortune (pastiche of various nineteenth-century detective novels. I bought it because I liked the cover, only to find that I didn’t like the style of writing…)
5. Anything by Thomas Hardy, I’m afraid
Felicity, I have struggled through ‘To The Lighthouse’ and ‘Great Expectations’…bizarrely enough, ‘To The Lighthouse’ seems to carry more resonance the more I study Woolf and Modernism. 5 books that I’ve tried to read and never finished…
1. Celia Ahern: P.S. I love you. I cringed as soon I hit page 10.
2. Lloyd Jones: Mr Pip. Just couldn’t get into it at all.
3. Jane Austen: Persuasion. Let’s just say I wasn’t persuaded.
4: Paulo Coehlo: the Zahir. Left on the beach in Newquay, massive fan of The Alchemist, as I not Daphne is not…
5: Virginia Woolf: The Waves. Actually this is cheating, technically I’m reading this at the moment but has been left obsolete for several weeks now so is not looking too hopeful…
I tend to get a slight sense of guilt when a book sits on my shelf having not been fully read. So here’s some that are currently staring at me, waiting for the break between essay deadlines…
1. Great Expectations (So glad that this is a common one as I feel like the only person in the world to have not read it when nodding and smiling along to references made to it in seminars)
2. A Christmas Carol (Especially at this time of year, I feel I’m letting both my love of novels and christmas down :) )
3. Confessions of an Opium Eater (has always been at the back of my mind but after Elizabeth’s comment is now a definite must read)
4. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia by Samuel Johnson (tends to drag during the philosophical discussions between characters but have an essay due on it in a few weeks so feel I should get a move on)
5. Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake (I love the Gormenghast trilogy, and probably have read Titus Alone but was so long ago I can’t remember the end, so probably needs a re-read)
Helen: I hope you enjoy reading Confessions in-between those essay deadlines – De Quincey’s writing is both completely loopy and greatly under-appreciated!
And if A Christmas Carol doesn’t take your fancy, how about Dickens’s related – and more politically radical – work, The Chimes? I remember reading this lesser known and more off-the-wall Christmas tale a couple of years ago. It unflinchingly reveals the callousness of C19 industrialisation, when relationships seem to be reduced to ‘human transactions’.
In the meantime, inspired by your list, I’m going to try and locate a copy of Gormenghast to plough through…
Cathy, I feel your pain; my love for Mrs Dalloway inspired me to try ’ To The Lighthouse’ and ‘The Waves’ but I hit a Modernist Wall and couldn’t go on.
5 more books gathering dust..
1. Kim, Rudyard Kipling. Far too ‘Boys Own’ for my liking, and all that tricky Indian jargon oh my.
2. Paradise Lost, John Milton. Love the story, hate reading it – such a very very very long poem.
3. If nobody speaks of remarkable things, Jon McGregor. What an odd narrative technique. It’s only a little one but I just couldn’t get into it.
4.A clockwork orange,Anthony Burgess. My boyfriend’s favourite book, it just makes me feel queasy
5.Les Mis
I’m so glad someone shares my inability to get through Tristram Shandy! You’re printing misfortune is horrific – There should be laws against that…
I think the reason i couldn’t make it through Woolf is because i’m not a huge fan of modernism…at all! I’m pretty sure i could be persuaded but that means actually having to read Woolf. I read once that Woolf’s brothers raped her as a child, and now all i can hear whenever i see her books is “pick me up, read me! pity me – my brothers raped me, please pick me up and read me!”. It’s frustrating…
Yes, it was more than a little embarrassing in the seminar! If I’d bought Shandy from a bookshop, I probably would have flicked through a copy and spotted any printing errors. My copy was ordered online, though, in a mad rush before the new term started at uni. Sigh
Eventually, I got a fault-free edition of the novel, but it’s one of those books with which I have a real love-hate relationship…
Felicity, yes apparently her half brother ‘felt her up’ as a child. But, as with Woolf, you never quite know what happened, or if she is telling you the truth…frustrating indeed.
I generally prefer to feel I’ve wasted time and be able to rant about a book than contemplate re-starting one I didn’t like/struggled with the first time round, but…
1) The Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien)- possibly too young at 13, although I did get a reasonable way in.
2) My Name is Red (Orhan Pamuk)- I just couldn’t get my head around his style of writing
3) Possession (AS Byatt)- currently on my second attempt
4) The Secret River (Kate Grenville)
4) Random Acts of Heroic Love (Danny Scheinmann) maybe I just got impatient for this to live up to the promise of the blurb.
I think your Shandy experience is brilliant. In fact your original copy is probably the Shandiest Shandy ever: look at the rest of the novel and tell me that it isn’t the most appropriate novel to get caught by this kind of printing error.
I have somewhat of a love-hate relationship with Shandy too. I love the ideas and like most of the book but find it intensely wearying to read the whole thing through.
Daphne, Rob. I probably haven’t finished Invisible Cities, but I tend to treat it like a book of very short short stories, and dip in and out.
For me:
1. Underworld – Don DeLillo. Couldn’t care less about baseball.
2. My Name is Red (I did actually finish it, but struggled and found the whole experience so worthless I wish I hadn’t finished it. I was sold on the promise it would be like The Name of the Rose. Ha!)
3.Titus Alone, as well. I didn’t find any of the things I loved in the previous books in it.
4. Dickens. In general, I have only ever finished Bleak House and that happened accidentally.
5. A book called ‘The Temp’ by Serena Mackesy, which I found in a house I was staying in on holiday, got really into, and then found that the last 30 pages were missing. It still bothers me that I don’t know what happened.
GAH!!!! you can’t have a reaction to atlas shrugged that begins with a yawn!!!!
this is terrible…but good that i know now, so i don’t recommend it for the book club, lol…
i’ve read it five times, at completely different points in my life, and each time have come away with a new appreciation…
then again, i read it after reading we the living and the fountainhead…perhaps my appreciation was built up, b/c you can see the evolution of her thoughts develop book to book, and finally fully deliver in atlas shrugged…
So… I gave up on Possession (again) around the start of December having gotten over half way through this time. I’ve read various other things since then and have an ever increasing to (re)read list. If anyone’s read (and enjoyed it), does it get more compelling once Blackadder and Cropper join forces to find out what Maud and Roland are up to or can it wait a while longer? Thanks
Perhaps it’d help if I adopted your approach to Rand’s work, starting with her earlier writings, before moving on to Atlas Shrugged, and so gradually building up an appreciation of her ideas rather than jumping in at the deep end!
All those unturned pages in my copy of Atlas are starting to bother me a teensy bit whenever I catch sight of the book languishing on my shelf… Maybe I should make it my mission to conquer Rand’s work (or some of it) before the year is out ;)
I just started on Possession and am enjoying it so far – was there a particular reason you can’t get through it? I want to brace myself in case things go rapidly downhill, lol (if I’m forewarned I might be able to struggle onwards! lol)…
1) The Waves – Virginia Woolf – I really struggled to get into this, but am hoping to pick it up again when I’m feeling more patient! Annoyingly it was my first attempt at her stuff so am trying not to be put off…
2) The Little Friend – Donna Tart – I am afraid to say I think I hated this. I cannot remember why but I know I was relieved to finally give up on it, although I often wonder what went wrong given how many people love her!
3) A Tale of Two Cities – Dickens – although in fact, anything Dickens..
4) The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck – I inherited this by accident, from whom I have no idea, and it has sat on my shelf looking lonely for a couple of years so I finally gave it a go but, unfortunately, shortly after finishing a string of books by other American authors so I think I was just in need of a complete change and The Grapes wasn’t it so I sadly ditched it about one third of the way through… It will probably remain lonely on my shelf for a couple more years before I try a re-run!
5) The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger – I don’t know WHY I gave up on this and am jealous of everyone else who has finished it. I even have a pretty hard back version, given to me as a birthday prez. But for some unknown reason I just put it down one day and never picked it up again. And that was in 2006…
There is something very miserable about unfinished books isn’t there…?!!!!
Oh and am I allowed a 6th?!
6) White Teeth – Zadie Smith – I tried reading it whilst travelling which was probably a bad idea as I never managed to concentrate enough and was sufficiently interrupted to finally give up. I hope one day I will try again!
Oh no… a 7th?
7) Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy – and annoyingly I saw a production of it by the English Touring Theatre only weeks after giving up on it, and absolutely loved the story so was so CROSS at not having persevered…
Ok that’s enough
Rowan, I’d urge you to give both Kim and Paradise Lost another try, but only when you have the time and are in the proper mood (admittedly, those two frames aligning at exactly the right moment might be asking too much of this mortal realm, lol)…
Seriously, though, both are definitely worth further exploration and are layered throughout with beautiful languages, powerful imagery and VERY interesting themes…
So, having now finished Possession, I can honestly say you’re probably better off waiting a bit longer – the end was quite a bit different than what I had anticipated, and doesn’t end so much with a bang, as a whimper…
Having finished your 2) and 3), I can assure you that you’re better off leaving them unfinished.
The Little Friend goes nowhere and, while I know plenty of plotless books that are wonderful, this isn’t. The ending was such a non-event that I struggled to understand the book and became violently irritated by it.
Doesn’t it just read like a very poor modern riff on To Kill a Mockingbird?
And Dickens? Who can stomach Dickens?
I was reading a similar article in the books section on the Guardian yesterday – except the author seemed to loathe the book and yet couldn’t stop reading it (which made me a bit concerned for his state of mind, lol)… I suppose anything that gets people reading is a ‘good’ thing, though the current economic climate and the one presented in the book are a bit different from each other…also, I think a lot of people who are reading it now might not get the larger message behind the work (in a nutshell, the tenets of Objectivism, which eventually led to the formation of the Libertarian political movement). To those readers I would say to read her trilogy of works, b/c you can really see the evolution of her ideas and, even if you don’t endorse them, they definitely act as good discussion points. However, I read this article, and then read the comments below, and it’s hilarious to see people getting snitty with each other over something that (as imbued with philosophy as it is) at the end of the day, it’s just a work of fiction… :) Thanks for the link though, will definitely read the Telegraph’s article…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/mar/27/ayn-rand-atlas-shrugged
I am ashamed to admit that I have rooms full of unfinished books, many of them books I was actually enjoying but got sidetracked by another book bought on impulse and probably also left unfinsihed! I’m desperate to discover the next book that grips me so that I can break the cycle. Really want to read the Ian M Banks sci fi series as really enjoyed the first one (what I read of it) and I don’t normally read sci fi; must get round to finishing all the Dickens novels I’ve started; have dozens by Stephen King lying around – including the last one in the Dark Tower series. I gave up on that as I felt it was getting too self indulgent when the author himself started appearing as a character, but still want to know how it all ends having committed myself to the rest of teh series. I’ve also started Far from the Madding Crowd about five times. Don’t find it an easy read, but want to give it at least one more try.
Ulysses! What the Helll is that all about? I think my frist mistake was not reading that 70 page intro which might have helped me understand what was going on. ts all about flows of consciousness apparently! I nearly lost consciousness trying to follow it! Probably read less pages than you!
I probably shouldn’t have been so negative, as it was a long time ago that I attempted it and I had no prior knowledge of what it was about before picking it up. I’ve studied a far bit since, so might be able to get more from it.
1) Independent People by Halldor Laxness. I read somewhere that the 200 pages are interminably dull descriptions of sheep farming in Iceland but then it opens up into a beautiful study of the relationship between a farmer and his adopted daughter. I wouldn’t know because I couldn’t make it through the sheep farming bits!
2) Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre. I’ve started this twice now and each time have completely lost interest about halfway through. It’s not even that I think it’s a bad book and Pierre certainly has a very individual style so maybe this is just one I’ll have to chalk up to personal taste?
3) Elizabeth, I’m with you on Wesley Stace’s Misfortune. Such an interesting topic ruined by sloppy writing and a surprisingly drippy protagonist.
4) A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. I actually thought this was awful. Acknowledging the pitfalls of writing an autobiography doesn’t mean you’re not immune to them. I didn’t think this was nearly as clever as Eggers clearly thought it was.
5) Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy. I really disliked Tess when I first read it but wanted to give Hardy another shot before coming to the conclusion that Hardy really wasn’t for me.
I find him totally impossible to get into as well. I have re-read the beginning of Far from the Madding Crowd dozens of times, but just can’t get beyond that. There’s something really dense about the writing that makes me feel like I’m swimming through treacle. (I’m sure his similies are better than mine!!) This is a completely ignorant appraisal, as I really should make the effort to get beyond those first few pages before making a judgement. If anyone can recommend a Hardy that they loed, I will certainly give it a try. Sometime a recommendation can provide the shove that will get me beyond chapter two.
Anna, I love Great Expectations – although agree the right mood is essential. Sometimes I approach Dickens and get bogged down in all the little asides etc, other times it just flows through me and I’m carried away by him. Great Expectations was an example of this. I just found it so visually enticing. Also, it’s quite short compared to a lot of Dickens!!
As for Waiting for Godot, if you’ve read the first half, you really don’t have to read the second half!! As a critic once said (and this is not word for word correct) “Godot is a play in which nothing happens – twice!”
I had to sudy it for a degree course, otherwise would never have made it to the end. It’s all very clever, but I found it a painful experience.
Thanks very much for the tips – I am thoroughly encouraged to give Great Expectations another go! I think that I will try and relax a bit more when I read it and not get too worried about all the little details, as it sounds like that would help at least get properly into it. )I think I get a bit intimidated by Dickens and feel like I have to spend more time on it than it needs).
As for Godot -that makes me feel better. I reckon I may say to people that I’ve actually read it if you can kind of get away with only reading half!!
Glad you’r going to give Charlie a second try, Anna. I also love Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. You do have to suspend a bit of disbelief and just enjoy the stories and characters for what they are.
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